In yesterday’s Disunion in the New York Times, Adam Goodheart wrote a highly significant piece related to emancipation. Goodheart relates the story of a young fugitive slave who on March 11, 1861, sought sanctuary by making his way across Charleston Harbor to Fort Sumter.

A day later, more slaves took the same action at another federal outpost in the Deep South, Fort Pickens, near Pensacola, Florida. The officer in charge of the post, Lt. Adam Slemmer, reported:

Although the escapees did not find the refuge they sought (Major Anderson at Fort Sumter also returned his young fugitive), that slaves hundreds of miles apart were taking the same desperate step is quite significant. They were the vanguard of many thousands of African Americans that would seek sanctuary in Union lines during the Civil War. They demonstrate the slaves’ awareness that their status ultimately underlay the escalating conflict between North and South and showed their willingness to act on that belief.

It also was probably no coincidence that slaves began to flee to Union lines within days of Abraham Lincoln taking office as President of the United States. They no doubt overheard whites talking bitterly about Lincoln and calling him a “Black Republican” or worse, and decided that if this man was so hated by white Southerners, the new President and the federal soldiers that represented him at isolated outposts like Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens must be their friends.

It also was significant that in mid-March 1861, the numbers of slaves seeking sanctuary with Union forces was small. It wasn’t just that federal-controlled installations were few by this time in the Lower South. Most slaves, who could reach outposts like Pickens and Sumter, wisely held back waiting to see if the prospect of freedom emerging from the developing conflict was real or illusory. It is not surprising then that the slave who showed up at Fort Sumter on March 11, 1861, as Adam Goodheart relates in Disunion was a juvenile. Actually fleeing to federal troops at that point was a rash action–something a youth might be expected to do.

So, as the secession winter gave way to spring, the slaves thought about how they might take advantage of developing events and a bold few even began to do something about it. Those that acted showed that African Americans would not be passive bystanders as the nation descended into Civil War. They would be joined by thousands of others in the months to come.

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com